


Seen Every Mask You've Hid Behind

by morganya



Category: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-24
Updated: 2005-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:12:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thom's always been the strong one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seen Every Mask You've Hid Behind

**Author's Note:**

> Written belatedly for [](http://jujubee419.livejournal.com/profile)[**jujubee419**](http://jujubee419.livejournal.com/)'s birthday. Thanks to [](http://atlantis-water.livejournal.com/profile)[**atlantis_water**](http://atlantis-water.livejournal.com/) for the initial read-through and suggestions.

  
Thom has the interview answers down to a science now. It's always the same thing: where he grew up, where he went to school, any siblings, his parents. He says them so often that he almost doesn't have to think about them, so ingrained that it's easy to believe he's always telling the truth. He gives the answers he wants to hear himself saying.

When they ask about his parents, he tells them about his father and the house in California. He always has to pause just after talking about his mother, the second when he actually says, "My mother passed away."

There's always that spiky, crystalline feeling when it's out there, disconnected from him and anything he could do. His shoulders always knot up in that two-second pause, before he charges on ahead, already anticipating the next question.

She's been gone for four years. She never saw his name in _House Beautiful_. She never saw him on the show. She never saw him get the Emmy.

Some days he wakes up and thinks he needs to send her something, some book, some picture she'd like, and only then remember she isn't there anymore.

*****

Lately, Thom leaves the television on, not bothering to watch it. He likes the background white noise. The drone of public access and the stilted cadence of made for TV movies fit into the space of the apartment, filling the corners with sound bubbles, and if he happens to forget and turn off the television, the sudden rush of silence feels like an ice water bath.

He doesn't bother to turn the set off when he leaves for work anymore. He keeps the sound low so as not to bother his neighbors, even while he realizes that it doesn't really matter, the walls are too thick and they don't really care what he does, anyway.

*****

He has an entire stack of CDs in his car, shoved sloppily in the console to his right and taking up most of the glove compartment. It's not quite the comforting cocoon of sound that he wants, and the music winds up distracting him a lot of the time, but he still can't seem to clear out them out of the car. He compensates by driving as fast as humanly possible to wherever it is he's going. He hasn't had an accident. He's had a few close calls, but it's nothing serious.

He keeps whacking his wrist against the steering wheel when he moves to shut off the ignition. It's been happening a lot: his left hand is covered with tiny bruises, like some weird disease. It seems to be part of a recent phenomenon. He walks into tables, hits his head on opened cupboard doors, burns himself on hot coffee pots. It happens at a languid pace, too slowly and disconnected from him to even hurt that much. He finds himself studying the marks distractedly, prodding at the bruises and feeling almost relieved when they start to throb, reminding him that they're there.

It actually kind of bothers him that they don't hurt most of the time.

****

At work, they keep trying to talk to him. Pull him aside, have a little heart-to-heart. Luckily it's not hard to find some excuse why he doesn't have time right now. Because he doesn't have time, and, anyway, he's fine.

He doesn't want to talk to Kyan, because Kyan's had enough to deal with, and besides, the conversation would probably take some weird detour into how Thom's looking after his spirituality right now, and Thom couldn't deal with that when it was his _priest_ saying that stuff, much less Kyan. Jai would sit and listen and try to be very understanding, but Thom's not sure that he actually would understand, that he was well equipped enough to be someone's counselor. The idea of baring his soul to Carson scares the shit out of him. Talking to the producers makes him feel like he's back in high school, pleasantly answering the teacher's questions and dying to get out of there.

It's times like this that he's glad that Ted comes from the Midwestern tradition that placed 'talking about feelings' somewhere below 'having an anesthesia-free root canal.' It's easier to sit in the conference room with Ted and bullshit about concerts and whatever than it is with almost everything else.

"Hall and Oates," Thom guesses.

"Never. I was at the height of my music snobbery back then. I wouldn't have been caught dead with a Maneater single."

"Ted, that's the point. It's things you're ashamed of doing."

Ted shrugs. "You know, Thom, I can't say that was really my issue back then."

"Yeah," Thom says. "Well, you've had a long time to practice your lying, so..."

"You always believe the worst in people," Ted says.

"Do not." Thom puts his elbows on the table. "I'm just bein' honest."

"That looks like it hurts," Ted says.

"Umm?"

"You've got one ugly-looking bruise there." Ted gestures at his right wrist. "How'd that happen?"

Thom looks down. The mark on his wrist almost looks like a butterfly tattoo, done in ugly shades of purples and reds and yellows. He doesn't remember how it got there. He stares at it for a minute.

"Huh," he says. "Look at that. I probably just whacked it on something. It's okay."

"Yeah?" Ted squints at his arm. For a second, he looks like a doctor, concern restrained by professional detachment. Thom isn't sure what to do. Finally he just pulls his sleeve back up.

"It's okay," he says. "It just looks weird right now."

Ted doesn't say anything at first. "Klutz," he says finally.

Thom shrugs, relieved. "I'm thinking of getting one of those padded suits. Cushion the blows."

"Good plan," Ted says. He considers for a moment, index finger crooked below his lower lip, which Thom thinks of as Ted's 'Should I say something else?' posture.

"I'm _okay,_ Ted," Thom says, starting to get annoyed.

"Well, as much as you can be," Ted shoots back. There are footsteps coming down the hallway. Ted gets up and heads in the direction of the coffee. He puts his hand on Thom's shoulder on the way. "Ice might help."

"Wow, thanks, Auntie Ted," Thom says. Ted's hand feels light and soft on his shoulder. Ted always touches people with a faintly distracted air, as if it was just something that happened while he was thinking of other things. Thom has to remind himself that he's at work, that he doesn't have the time for this, before he stops wanting to ease back into the contact, and he just says, softer than he'd originally planned, "I'll take care of it, Ted."

"Yeah, I know," Ted says. He rubs Thom's shoulder lightly with the side of his thumb, then turns to the coffee.

*****

Thom's father sounds distracted and rushed on the phone, which makes Thom feel better. These days one of his worries is that his dad doesn't have enough stuff to do, or else that he's spending too much time by himself.

"Have you talked to your brother?"

"We talk all the time," Thom says.

His brother lives about thirty minutes away from him. Thom brought him along to some kind of event a while ago, and Jules seemed to be somewhere between nonplussed and amused by how much attention his weird little brother was getting. They've both been too busy to do more than send each other sporadic emails for the past few months.

"Thomas," his father warns.

It didn't matter how old you were, your parents always knew when you were lying to them.

"It'll be easier now," Thom says. "We're not so crazy over here anymore. More time to ourselves."

He got distracted or something when he was coming in the apartment door, and he somehow managed to scrape his knuckles against the doorframe, taking off the top layer of skin. The knuckles look shiny-pink and edged with red and white, like raw meat.

In some ways, Thom supposes, he liked the crazy pace of the past two years better than this new, less stress-inducing one. He was always better when he had some work to think about.

"How's the project going?" Thom asks. The last time he talked to his father, he'd mentioned some complicated technical thing that he wanted to either fix or build, and it had turned into engineering mumbo-jumbo pretty fast, which was somewhat beyond Thom's repertoire of conversation.

His father avoids the question. "You know, I was thinking the other day..."

"Yeah," Thom says quietly, staring across the room at the television. The sound's down too low to really distinguish any words; on the screen an overcoiffed soap opera actress raises her hands to her face, earrings and necklace glittering under hot studio lights.

"About how proud she always was of you kids."

"Yeah," Thom says. The actress on the television drops her hands, shuts her eyes. "Yeah, Dad, I know."

*****

In the town car, after the shooting's over for the day, Kyan falls asleep in the front seat and Ted stares at his cell phone like he's never seen it before. Thom stares out the window and watches the buildings blur together as they pass. He's not sure if he feels tired or not.

"I hate driving," he tells Ted when it seems like the city outside him has turned into one big gray blur. "And I hate this day. I really mean it."

Ted looks at him curiously. "What brought this on?"

Thom looks back out the window. He wishes the driver would turn on the radio. Talk radio. Top Forty. Something. "I don't know. It doesn't matter. I want to go home."

Ted says nothing. Finally he unbuckles his seatbelt, glancing nervously around as if he were doing something wrong, and slides over the seat next to Thom and puts his arm around Thom's shoulders.

"Knock it off," Thom says, but it comes out sounding lame. Ted just shrugs. He tells him a story about some place back in Chicago, maybe real and maybe imaginary, some hotel where they let you keep cats and dogs in their own rooms and where there were huge chocolate fondue fountains instead of televisions in the regular guest rooms, and eventually Thom just slumps against Ted's side, his elbow brushing against the sharp, lanky angles of Ted's body.

*****

Sabra, the representative from _Entrepreneur_, comes over to Thom's office, bearing photos so Thom can see just how pitiful some of the entries are. Sabra comes in at what qualifies as the office lunch hour - Thom checking the preliminary budgets for clients and picking at a turkey sandwich, Jonathan, one of the interns, rushing out the door to meet with a furniture vendor, and one of his designers, Natalie, drafting a sketch of the Harharmians' bedroom on the computer. In the middle of all of this Sabra bustles in, face full of enthusiasm, arms full of photos and applications.

Sabra is the kind of woman who used to hang posters of Gandhi and Mumia Abu-Jamal up on her college dorm walls. She fairly crackles with intensity as she describes the applicants, and Thom wonders why she's even bothering with him at all, if she's already got an idea of who really needs the makeover most.

From what he can see, they _all_ need something. She shows him photo after photo of offices with paint coming off the ceilings, computers one step above typewriters, rugs matted and of indeterminate color. He sifts through the photos and makes appropriate groaning noises while Sabra tells him about the companies.

He knows it's for a good cause - making over philanthropic small businesses, giving them a chance to upgrade their technology, it's something he's actually been kind of looking forward to - but after thirty minutes of Sabra telling him about companies based around trying to counsel abused women, or visiting dying kids in the hospital, or trying to get legal aid for homeless people, he starts feeling uneasy.

In some respect, he knows, he shouldn't feel like this, he should just be glad that these things are getting done, but he can't. It's upsetting to look at photos where all the offices are so empty and rundown and sad-looking, and realize that it's probably because they can't get funding, or they've been dealing with sadness for so long that they can't get it together enough to even put a goddamn fucking plant in the window.

"I think you might like this," Sabra says. She hands him another photo. Another sad-looking office, with a battered looking copying machine and a desk with gnaw marks on the legs. There's a German Shepherd lying on the imitation Oriental rug, a rawhide strip between its paws.

"Awww," Thom says. The dog's all tan and black. It has the face of a teddy bear. "Look at the baby."

Sabra points at the company name. "Rescued Rescuers. They try to find homes for retired police dogs. I read about this somewhere. When some sort of big disaster happens, the workers brought in rescue dogs to try to find survivors. Except sometimes there's something so big that happens, a bomb or a crash, and there really aren't any survivors to find. So the poor things keep digging out these dead bodies from the wreckage, you know..."

Thom stares at the photograph. The dog's head is cocked slightly at the camera, its ears perked up. Paco looks the same way when he hears his name.

"They can't handle it," Sabra says. "The dogs keep finding dead body after dead body, and no survivors, and it traumatizes them. It's like, they've been trained to save people, they associate saving people with being good. And when they can't do that, they stop eating, stop sleeping. It's like they have this sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome."

The dog's eyes are soft and trusting. It looks back at Thom with its teddy bear face, a blank mask of a face, the past behind it unknowable and unreachable.

"They just can't work anymore. They can't handle seeing all that death, and they can't understand what's happening."

"Stop," Thom says. He hears Natalie stop working at her computer. The chair feels like it's buckling out from under him, and he thinks _I can't do this now, not here, please, not here_. "Stop, please."

Sabra stops talking, looking puzzled and annoyed. She sweeps the photo away from him, goes on to the next one.

It takes another forty minutes for Sabra to leave. After he's said goodbye, promised to consider the choices and what he'd like to do with them, and waved at her from the top of the stairs, Thom goes into the bathroom, quietly closes the door behind him and throws up.

When he finally stops coughing bile into the sink, he runs water over his face, takes a shaky breath and goes back to work. Natalie is standing by the door, ashen with concern. He tells her that he's probably just coming down with something, it's nothing to worry about, it's all right.

*****

The meeting at Scout is in an hour. It's probably not all that crucial in the grand scheme of things, just 'where have we been, where are we going,' circular talk that should hopefully take up a few hours. Thom's got it down to a routine by now.

He puts _Exile on Main Street_ in the CD player and guns the motor. If he hurries he can get there in twenty minutes, get past the traffic and out of his suffocating car. He knows he's probably going too fast.

He almost gets into an accident at the corner of 6th and Lexington - somebody in a red Lexus, going even faster than he is, shooting past Thom's front fender in a shiny blur, and the only reason Thom doesn't crash into it is him slamming on the brakes and twisting the wheel, tires making a horrible wailing sound on the pavement. The guy in the Lexus just leans on his horn and keeps going, gone so fast Thom isn't sure what happened for a moment.

The hair on the back of his neck is standing up, and he's too freaked out to breathe. He forces himself to keep going; he needs to get to work, and he doesn't have time for this crap, not when nothing really bad happened.

When he pulls into the parking lot at Scout and turns off the car, he starts to shake. He leans his elbows against the steering wheel and tries to get it together, but he can't get enough air and his breathing sounds harsh and strained. He pounds against the wheel with his fists and forces himself to get out of the car and stand up on unsteady legs and walk to the elevator.

He tries to give himself a pep talk as the elevator doors close, calling himself by his last name like a football coach, but he can't really hear it. He can't stop shaking and the blood is pounding through his head like waves, and it was only a _car_, nothing happened, and he can't breathe.

When he gets to the conference room, Ted, ever punctual, is the only one there. Thom shuts the door and tries to smile.

Ted immediately gets up. "Thom. What happened?"

He starts to say, _Nothing, I'm okay_, but it's like trying to talk through cotton wool, and all that comes out is a gasp. Ted touches his shoulder, strong fingers wrapped around his arm. For an awful second, Thom thinks he's going to cry.

"You need to sit down," Ted says. Thom shakes his head violently, but he can't get it together enough to really fight. Ted guides him out of the conference room, down the hall, and they're in the lounge and Thom manages to pull away and collapse onto the couch.

"I don't want anyone to see me," he rasps through the waves pounding in his head, pressing his hands against his eyes. "Ted, I don't anyone to see me like..."

Ted shuts the door; Thom hears it lock. The flood of relief is momentary, and then it's just trying to fight through the waves and his throat closing around what feels like cotton, blocking off the air. He thinks he's going to choke to death, he's going to sit here on this ugly-ass couch and actually choke to death, and then Ted's voice, quiet and steady, saying, "Thom, take a deep breath. You're doing fine, Thom. Just in and out. Slowly. You're doing fine."

It's the only thing that seemed to make sense. Thom clings to it. He puts his elbows on his knees and tries to breathe normally, but all he can manage is a sobbing gulp.

"Slowly," Ted says. He's rubbing Thom's back, calm up and down movements. "It's going to be all right. It's going to be okay."

He feels air rush into his lungs, rush back out again. He coughs and tries again. He's still shaking and his heart is hammering, but the cotton in his throat seems to have disappeared and he can breathe again. "Uh."

"How's that?"

"Better." Thom coughs. "Oh my God."

Ted hasn't stopped rubbing his back. "Do you need anything?"

"No."

"Think you can tell me what's going on now?"

"It was just something stupid that happened with the car," Thom says. "Everything's fine, nobody got hurt. I'm okay."

"No offense, Thom, but that line hasn't worked in a while. What - what's really going on?"

"_Nothing_," Thom says, and then feels even worse. He knows, on some level, that this has to be difficult for Ted, that he isn't comfortable trying to draw people out, and besides, Thom just had a meltdown in front of him and it still hasn't quite receded. "This is just fuckin' embarrassing, Ted."

"I know, believe me," Ted says.

"I wish I was, like, drunk or something," Thom says. He takes a shaky breath. "That way I could blame it on something."

"Do you want me to -"

"Don't go away," Thom says, voice just this side of shrill, and winces. "Sorry."

"Eh. I don't have anywhere to go."

"I think I'm losing it, Ted."

"I don't think you are."

"But -" This is ridiculous. He doesn't know why he's doing this. "I mean -"

"You're just sad," Ted says softly.

Thom stares at his hands. He shakes his head lamely, no, no, that's not true. He just can't say it.

"You know, you're allowed, Thom."

"This isn't supposed to happen," Thom says. It's like a slow-motion car crash, something crumpling inside him, and he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying. "This isn't supposed to _happen_, not to me, not to my -"

Ted pulls him close, all gangly arms and sharp angles, stroking his hair. Thom presses his eyes into his shoulder.

"It's not -" Ted says, and then starts over. "We've all been worried sick about you. _I've_ been worried sick about you. I - we all care about you."

"I know," Thom mumbles. "I know, I just..."

"You don't need to be strong all the time," Ted says. "You know. It can wait."

He starts to say something else, but he's too worn out and upset to keep going, keep protesting. He'll stand back up in a little while, battered and punch-drunk, but ready for the next round. In a little while.

"Thank you," he says against Ted's shoulder. "For, you know."

"Yeah, yeah," Ted says, sounding embarrassed. He rests his cheek against the top of Thom's head. Thom closes his eyes and listens to Ted talking, Ted's deep, steady voice saying, "It'll get easier. We'll get through it. I'm here."


End file.
